This is the one line I still remember from a poem recited by a young man calling himself “the African poet.” The occasion was a Black History Month event in the Middlesex County College Auditorium.

His brother, an employee of the counseling center who introduced him as a prelude to the main speaker, seemed a bit rattled. He sort of, kind of, disassociated himself from the statement. I flattered myself that my presence in the crowd caused his embarrassment. Later I detected a couple of other white men present. Jere Shindleman and Norman Poppel were seated in back near the exit. They headed something called the Center for Holocaust Studies, which had kicked in a couple thousand toward the speaker’s fee.

The speaker at the event, John Hendrik Clarke, was obviously on the same wavelength as the African Poet. He never actually used the word “Jew” but when he spoke in no friendly spirit about “the horse and the rider” it was pretty clear that Blacks were the horse, Jews the detested rider. His point, like the poet’s, was that Jews were not friends of Black folks but just as bad as other whites, and maybe worse because of their baneful influence over the horse.

This interpretation is implicitly supported by Barack Obama’s good friend, beer-swigging buddy, Henry Louis”Skip” Gates, professor of English and chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard. On July 20, 1992 The New York Times published an op-ed piece by Professor Gates entitled “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars”

In this column we read that Prof. Clarke wrote the introduction to the recently re-issued "The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism, and Aggression" by Michael Bradley. This book argues that white people are so vicious because they, unlike the rest of mankind, are descended from the brutish Neanderthals. Better yet it speculates that the Jews may have been the " 'purest' and oldest Neanderthal-Caucasoids," the iciest of the ice people; hence (he explains) the singularly odious character of ancient Jewish culture.”

The column also mentioned that Dr. Clarke has recently attacked multiculturalism as the product of what he called the "Jewish educational Mafia."

The speaker made repeated references to the Ice People during his talk, which was enthusiastically received by the crowd. As I was leaving during the Q & A session a sociologist from my department and one of the counselors urged me to ask a question of my own. Should I ask him what kind of pill I should take to cure me of being a white man. They responded by urging me to be respectful. I said I didn’t feel very respected and went on my way.

Just as I exited a Puerto Rican came to the mike to ask a question about African/Puerto Rican solidarity. Prof. Clarke told him that as far as he was concerned “a Puerto Rican ain’t nothing but a pseudo-white man.”

An interesting response from founding chairman of the Department of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York.